Author: Mark Young
Date: 02:35:40 10/19/04
Go up one level in this thread
On October 19, 2004 at 02:31:54, Roger D Davis wrote: >Several years ago, back before RGCC even existed (before Rec.games.chess split), >computers were lucky to beat human masters. Then the masters fell, then the >international masters, and now computers are as good as most GMs, maybe as good >as all but the top GMs, and maybe somewhat better than the top GMs. Who knows. >The point, however, is that progress is indeed being made, and it doesn't show >any sign of abating. > >My questions are these: Will computers ever become so strong that GMs will feel >lucky even to draw? Will the percentage of GM versus computer draws slowly >diminish, even among the top humans, so that computers will someday completely >and totally dominate? No need to go out on a limb here. Look at the history of Man Vs. Machine. Fritz and Hydra just won big over two 2700+ GM's and one 2500+ GM. Each scoring 3.5 out of 4. Junior scored was 1.5 out of 4. Equal to GM Topalov (2757 elo) the best scoring GM. My bet is the programmers of Junior gambled on a version of Junior they thought would do well playing GM's and lost. They have and played many versions of Junior even in the same tournament in the past. This would be my guess why Junior had a poor showing. > >Remember...chess isn't a solved game. Perhaps white always win. So as computers >improve, they should begin to win more and more often as their strength comes to >approximate perfect play. But even if white doesn't always win, it may >nevertheless be that if the 2nd best move is made in any position, that side is >lost. Maybe perfect play can only draw and anything else loses. And just which >side do you think might make the 2nd best move...the human or some future >Quantum-computing beast? > >Another reason to believe that eventually even the strongest humans will be on >the losing side: Recently, it was posted that as computers have become faster, >programs authors have actually been REMOVING knowledge from their evaluation >function. In other words, deeper searches are better than explicit knowledge, >this presumably because chess has proven to "consist" more of combinatorial >tactics than of positional strategy. This was predicted here on CCC that Chess Knowledge in programs would be replaced by search as computers searched deeper. Since chess is pure tactics and positional strategy is more or less an invention of the human brain. Positional strategy is needed by humans to deal with the deeper tactics in chess. > >Accordingly, it would seem that the humans are the ones with the "horizon >effect" (Surprise!!), meaning that the combinatorial tactics that computers >handle quite nicely just doesn't reduce as much to positional rules as we might >like. Sure, humans might learn a few tricks from computers as computers continue >to improve, but once we've lost the lead, we won't ever regain it. What happens >when a computer regularly searchs to double the number of plies we see today. >Can a human GM even draw such a beast? > >Roger
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